Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev, NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman and Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency will spend the next five months on the ISS.

Two Russians and an American are already at the ISS, bringing the total crew to six.

Christmas presents, as well as supplies and equipment were taken up.

The latest crew will conduct three space walks during their mission to install a radio antenna, and will also deploy a satellite, before returning to Earth in May.

The successful docking comes after a scare on Thursday when Russian Mission Control lost contact with both the ISS and the Soyuz spaceship. Several hours later the connection was successfully restored.

According to a Russian Mission Control officer, similar outages are rare. “Such connection failures happen, but they are fixed quickly,” the source told Interfax.